Friday, July 31, 2015

Jesus vs aliens: the culture war at Roswell


Wow, this is weird:
I had these stereotypical alien abduction experiences when I was a kid,” Guy Malone tells me. “Little creatures with big black eyes were raping me and trying to eat me and trying to operate on me.”

We’re standing in the Roswell [New Mexico] mall’s CosmiCon—a space-themed collection of comics, costumes and other oddities presented in collaboration with Roswell’s 20th annual UFO festival, a kind of alien enthusiasts’ TED conference and county fair. Malone, an effusive storyteller with an easy laugh and a slight Tennessee twang, is here to hawk his memoir and pick up a few new believers while he’s at it.

“There were multiple dreams and memories spread across years. I didn’t want to believe it, but once I read books on the subject I thought, ‘yep, that’s me.’”

Malone’s a Christian now, and he no longer believes aliens abducted him—he thinks demons are responsible for the terrifying recurring visions of his childhood and adolescence. After finding Christianity, Malone says he received a calling from God in 1999 to move to Roswell, where he would spread the word of Jesus as a means of stopping alien abductions.

Yup, there's apparently a culture war between competing fantasies in Roswell, New Mexico. Of course, it's all about money, too, since UFOs bring in a lot of money to the community.
It’s a microcosmic culture war in which competing believers—of extraterrestrial identity, of Christian theology, of the holy church of the American dollar—proselytize their own mutually exclusive notions of reality.

I see no real reason to comment on this. I just thought it was interesting - and very, very weird.


PS. For a hoot, try doing a Google image search for "Jesus aliens." Yeah, that's where I got these images, but there are lots more where they came from!

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